LindyAF
Well-known member
To make more than a little sense out of this stuff one needs to realize that in US political context "Asians" as a voter group are a purely artificial bag, much like "Hispanics", consisting of few dozens or so of nationalities with different cultures and demographic profiles, and also different numerical impact on the whole grab bag of "Asians". A lot of them lean democrat, true, but a lot of their subgroups do so for shockingly different reasons. Some of it is raw propaganda/media power of DNC's allies - recently seen with these "scandals" about right wing politicians speaking of COVID with terms like "Chinese virus" and acting outraged that its "racist against Asians"... Waitaminute, Asians, all of them? Even the non-insignificant amount of them who aren't Chinese, and on top of that, even those who hate the CCP or despise China for reasons related to their own heritage?
After all, the famously controversial and hard hitting nickname for WHO, "Chinese Health Organization", has been coined not by some white nationalist, nor by Trump administration, but by a Japanese politician.
I disagree that "Asian" in the US context is an artificial bag, any more than it is an artificial bag in a global context. Are there differences between the Chinese and the Japanese, the Japanese and the Korean? Yes. And yes, there are arguably even greater differences between, say, the Mongolians and the Vietnamese. These differences are both cultural and racial. There have been fierce conflicts over these differences between these groups, numerous wars between them.
Are the differences between the Chinese and the Mongolian greater than the differences between the Chinese and the Irish, or the Japanese and the Italians? No, that's ludicrous.
On that note, yes, the southeast Asian (Vietnam, Laos, Burma, etc.) vs northeast Asian (Japan, China, Korea) difference probably does explain *some* of the affinity for affirmative action- I have not seen data to confirm this, but while it is known that it is disadvantageous to northeast Asians relative to general pop, it is at least fairly commonly suspected that is is beneficial to southeast Asians. But I think this is very unlikely to explain the whole or even much of the support here- southeast Asians are a small portion of the total broader racially Asian (northeast + southeast) population. I haven't seen a poll break it down by subset on this issue though, and if you have I'd be curious.
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